Has there ever been a verified case of women piling on a sexual misconduct case for the fame/money?

[Corry_El]

@Noel_Prosequi

But bandwagoning on a celebrity is much harder. A false complainant would have to be very lucky to have a plausible connection with the celebrity to demonstrate basic opportunity.

That’s a good argument why a very small % of all opportunistic amoral woman will get into a position to gain fame/money via false claims of sexual misconduct by celebrities. It’s a less convincing argument why any given celebrity with an already dodgy reputation couldn’t pretty easily being the victim of false accusers piling on. As was said, celebrities are pretty much by definition people who have a lot of contact with other people, at least in their active phase of gaining celebrity. And celebrities with already dodgy reputations for their sexual conduct are more likely to put themselves in gray area situations where an unscrupulous accuser can take advantage to say something really bad as opposed to just tawdry really happened.

That being said, again, if there were cases of well known men subject to multiple accusations of sexual misconduct in different incidents and all the accusers ‘were shown’ to have been lying, every reasonably well informed person would already know about them.

[Shalmanese]

@Chronos

Indeed, the definition of a celebrity, in some sense, is that they’re someone who meets lots of people. You don’t need very much of a connection at all to make an accusation plausible: Say, for instance, that the celebrity was shooting a movie in your city, and you ran into him at a bar, and he slipped something into your drink. At the very least, anyone worthy of being called a celebrity will have spent plenty of time in Los Angeles and New York, so that’s already a pool of tens of millions of potential partners (and hence potential accusers). How many women out of that population would be willing to falsely accuse a celebrity of something? I dunno.

But I don’t think women are just waiting around, coldly calculating the odds of a pay day and then calmly executing on the plan. It seems pretty much all cases of false rape accusations, the accuser was psychologically wrapped up in trying to damage certain people or impress certain people and it was very much a heat of the moment kind of thing.

So it doesn’t really matter how many people any person meets up with over the course of their lifetime unless you can show there really is a sizeable contingent of women who are just waiting to pounce on rape claims to get their piece.

[md2000]

@Chronos

A civil case is also a lot easier to prove against someone than a criminal case. In a civil case, the jury just has to decide which side is more likely to be correct. In a criminal case, though, you need to prove that the accused did it to beyond a reasonable doubt, which is never precisely pinned down, but a lot tighter than just 50%. So if A is trying to get B jailed for rape, and B is trying to get A jailed for filing false police reports, it’s quite possible for both to fail, even though someone’s going to win the lawsuit.

I thought it was up to the defendant (the person being sued) to decide whether to have a jury trial or a judge. I assume it would be logical in a case where the accused comes across unsympathetic versus the plaintiff, that they would choose a trial by judge. Unless the facts are not good… in which case, it doesn’t matter.